To preserve her position, it will be necessary for all good women to try and elevate the condition of their sisters.  With all of us, “the world is too much with us, day by day;” and worldly success plays so large a part in the domestic drama, that woman is everywhere perceptibly influenced by it.  Hence, to return to the closer consideration of the subject from our own point of view, the majority of men’s wives in the upper and middle classes fall far short of that which is required of a good wife.  They are the wives not made by love, but by the chance of a good match.  They are the products of worldly prudence, not of a noble passion; and, although they may be very comfortable and very well clad, though they may think themselves happy, and wear the very look of health and beauty, they can never be to their husbands what a wife of true and real tender love would be.

The consequence is that, after the first novelty has passed away, the chain begins to rub and the collar to gall.  “The girl who has married for money,” writes a clergyman, “has not by that rash and immoral act blinded her eyes to other and nobler attractions.  She may still love wisdom, though the man of her choice may be a fool; she will none the less desire gentle, chivalrous affection because he is purse-proud and haughty; she may sigh for manly beauty all the more because he is coarse and ugly; she will not be able to get rid of her own youth, and all it longs for, by watching his silver hair.”  No; and, while there comes a curse upon her union—­whilst in the long, long evenings, in the cold Spring mornings, and in the still Summer days, she feels that all worth living for is gone, while she is surrounded by all her body wants—­her example is corrupting others.  The scorned lover, who was rejected because he was poor, goes away to curse woman’s fickleness and to marry some one whom he can not love; and the thoughtless girls, by whom the glitter of fortune is taken for the real gold of happiness, follow the venal example, and flirt and jilt till they fancy that they have secured a good match.

Many women, after they have permanently attached a husband of this sort, sit down, with all the heroism of martyrs, to try to love the man they have accepted, but not chosen.  They find it a hard, almost an impossible task.  Then comes the moment so bitterly predicted by Milton, who no doubt drew from his own feeling and experience, when he put into the mouths of our first parents the prophecy that either man should never find the true partner of his choice, or that, having found her, she should be in possession of another.  This is far too often true, and can not fail to be the source of a misery almost too bitter to be long endured.